TV Review – Gotham Episode 2 “Selina Kyle”

Episode two of Gotham gives us a better look of what life in Gotham City was like, before the Bat. As expected, it pretty much sucks. Homeless kids are being kidnapped by a pair of really friendly crazies, to be sent overseas to someone known as the Dollmaker, Falcone lets Fish know that he talked to Cobblepot before he “died” and decides she needs a lesson about who is in charge, and Selina lets Gordon know that she saw the Wayne’s killer. This episode felt more rounded than the pilot, and there was more good than bad about it.

However, there were some things that weren’t as good.

The Good

Living in Gotham sucks. Even if you are one of the privilege who get to eat in the fancy restaurants, you still run the risk of having homeless kids being thrown at you during the soup course.

Bullock is a Grade “a” dick. Who apparently thinks that all questionings, from taking a statement, to giving an interrogation should involve a beating.

People who are leaving Gotham? Also dicks. Sure, television drama frat boys can be rude, obnoxious and below average intelligence, but in Gotham, they seem to raise the bar.

Cobblepot is a psycho. In the first episode we saw him as a weirdo, trying to become a player in the underworld, but we now see that there is more than meets the eye to this freak (well, unless you’ve ever seen Crispin Glover, who the fantastic Robin Lord Taylor, is well on his way to dethrone as king of the freaks.)

Organized crime owns the city. This has been said before, but the level of corruption is astounding, and the show’s writers really do a good job of portraying this.

“The Waynes and the Falcones were the pillars of the same house, we understood each other” What is meant by this? In the traditional Batman mythos, the Waynes were always striving to make the city they loved better. Was Thomas Wayne just trying to ease the pain of the crime element for his city? Time will tell.

Throwaway line of the week: “Big hemi’s in there… somewhere”

The Bad

Seriously? “Cat”? “You walk like a penguin”? Yes we get it, these are the people who become Catwoman and The Penguin. I understand it is just the second episode, but your core audience knows this, and the people who don’t, probably don’t enjoy being hit in the face with it, like Bullock asking them to pass the butter.

For an episode called “Selina Kyle” she seems conspicuously missing the first half. Yeah, so she ended up saving the day…no wait, her actions in this episode had no bearing to the outcome. At all.

Nigma’s creepiness seems forced. However, we can be glad that the line, “don’t give us any more of your riddles, Eddie.” wasn’t used.

“I can’t believe the system is so corrupt” “You have no idea…” As I stated above, the writers do a really good job showing this. There is no reason they had to tell us as well.

Really? They didn’t notice the van, the same van the sole witness described to them as Bullock was calling Gordon a monkey? It was parked not half a block away. Even I could read the writing as it pulled away. Nice work, detectives. Hopefully someone more observant will come around in the next 7-10 years, which leads us to….

Bruce Wayne, thrash metal and creepy drawings? Sure any guy who dresses as a bat and hunts criminals has issues, but they are portraying him as “shoot up a school” crazy. He explains his on camera burning himself and off camera cutting as “testing himself” so maybe that can be explained away. However, this boy is not processing his grief quite right, and there will be issues. Oh, and Jim? When a preteen says they are conducting self-harm to “test” themselves, perhaps a good thing to ask is, “For what?” Or even “why”. I understand you don’t have children (yet) but there are somethings as a police detective, you’ve got to know.

What I’m on the fence about

Richard Kind as the mayor. He plays slimy well, but his character is going to have to do something really nasty for me to take him seriously.

All in all, this was a great second episode, and gives me high hopes for the future of the series.

About the author

Mark Driscoll

When not ranting about the current state of his favorite comics or working on The Magic Cantina, Mark spends a majority of his time renovating his newly purchased, 120 year old Victorian house. Badly. He is very bad at talking about himself in the third person, as he thinks it make him sound pretentious.